


The Night is Dark

by Siamesa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dreams, F/M, The Raven Cycle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 12:50:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8209051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: He has always dreamt of the girl.  Of the white snow, and the red tree, and the girl who sits beneath it, as red and as white as her world.  
In which Stannis can pull things from dreams, and it does not make anything easier.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Semi-fusion with the Raven Cycle books; shouldn't require knowledge of them to understand, though I do highly recommend them in general.

Stannis has always had the dreams.  He has awoken, since he was very small, to find strange things made of jewels or iron or nightmare-bones resting on his pillow.  He has never been assigned any nurses or servants but the old ones, the ones who had raised his father.

_Elenei's Gift,_ Lord Steffon calls it, the relic of god's blood.  His eyes are dark and solemn.  Stannis straightens his back.  He is five years old.

"I'll teach you.  What I can."  But Father has duties that take him far from Storm's End, and Stannis has another teacher.

-

He has always dreamt of the girl.  Of the white snow, and the red tree, and the girl who sits beneath it, as red and as white as her world.  Her wrists are thin bones.  Her eyes are as old as the sun.  He does not know her language.

But they sit together, in the snow beneath the tree, where sometimes there are pools of steaming water and sometimes tracks of ancient beasts.

"Stannis," he says, and points to himself.  "Stannis Baratheon."  Robert had laughed at him, when he was three, and could not say the name of his own house.  Each syllable fires and hits now, a row of crossbow bolts. 

She takes his hand.  He'd thought it would be cold, but it is nearly too hot to touch.  "Melony."

She watches him as he makes impossible things.  A toy soldier, for Robert, that moves.

(That he must never give to Robert, Father tells him.  Elenei gave his brother no gifts.  Robert will foster with Lord Arryn, and when they are men grown, Father will sit them down together, and tell the secret of their House, and all will be well.)

"Robert is my brother," he tells Melony.  She listens even when she doesn't understand.  "He's the heir.  He doesn't dream."  These are the facts of Robert.

One night, Melony sings to him.  The words dance just beyond his reach.

"Stannis," she says, and laces their fingers together, and smiles.  "Gift."  Her eyes are red.  Her eyes have always been red.

He wakes, his fingers unburnt, the flame sitting soft and warm in his hands.

-

One night, when he is seven, he has a nightmare.  He wakes to the sound of rattling chains, to a gaping maw of dragon teeth.  He screams.  He throws a pillow at it, a candlestick, then falls from his bed.

His arm is bleeding. 

HIs arm is bleeding, and he cannot breathe, and the shiny black thing is crawling down from his bed, clicking its jaws.  He tries to scrabble to his feet, and then sharp claws close around his ankle, bright bursts of pain.  He screams, again and again, kicking back and clawing forward.

For the first time, he sees death. Death is the darkness around him.  Death is the air and the pain and the thing behind him, the thing that doesn't care that he is a Lord's son, doesn't care that he does well in his lessons and minds his father and makes blossoms from rubies from nothing so Melony will smile.

His father comes.  In his hand is a sword made from lightning, and the nightmare bleeds and hisses and crumbles away.  His father holds him as he sobs, as he straightens his back, as he vows with squeezed-shut eyes to never be a coward again.

"You're no coward, son," Lord Steffon says, and there are tears drying on his own cheeks.  "You are no coward.  I am only a fool."  He kneels down, and puts his hands on Stannis' arms, drawing him back into an embrace.  "I'll train you.  _Truly_ train you, and Aerys can sulk as he will."

The years that follow are the best years Stannis will ever know.

-

With Father's help, he makes an hourglass that never runs dry.  The sand pours through, but the bottom stays half-full and the top half-empty.  It sits on his shelf, two feet from his lessons, and no one notices. 

He makes three more, each more perfect than the last.  The glass is clearer, the sand brighter.  His third can measure half an hour, bulbs running dry like any other glass, but instead of sand it is filled with sparks of light, half firefly, half star.

"They're not alive," he says to his father, but there's a question in it.  The nightmare was alive.

"They're not," says Father, a hand on his shoulder.  "Would you like them to be?"

-

His first _true_ living dream is a bird.  A hawk, like Robert's.  She's sleek and clever and proud, and she follows him from room to room, perching on his shoulder.

She cannot fly.

It is his own failure, that this thing he has made is so broken.  His own failure, when Robert laughs.  He could have given her the skies, and instead he gave her twisted wings, and still she loves him.

_It isn't real._

That's when he understands.  A true thing would hate him, for how he had failed.  But he dreamt Proudwing, he made her, and just as he gave her shining eyes and broken wings, he'd given her love for Stannis Baratheon.  It isn't real.  It's just a pale reflection of himself.

But he watches her, and doesn't love himself at all.

-

Renly was everything Stannis was not.  He always had been, since the day that Lord Steffon had found him, red and squalling, at the foot of his second son's bed.

_"I'm sorry, father."_

He'd dreamt of someone.  Someone with Robert's round face, and booming laugh.  Someone who understood people, who liked feasts, who people would admire and adore.  Who smiled, because even Mother said that Stannis had never learned to smile.

He'd meant to make an image, something to stay in the snowy forest, something he could watch and imitate or maybe simply destroy.  He hadn't meant to make a _brother._

Father scoops the babe up in his arms, and the horrible noise stops.  "This isn't the first time, Stannis.  Someday I'll show you, on the family tree -"  But he draws off to smile at the babe.  "You'll need a name, little one.  Won't your lady mother be surprised!"

Stannis stumbles through the rest of the day.  The babe is tied to his life, Father tells him.  When Stannis dies, his brother will fall asleep, never to awaken. 

He buries his face in his pillow, and waits for sleep, and Melony.

-

There are others like Renly.

Only one of them is still alive, a little dragon, crystalline and purple, that his lord father had dreamt up to please the Lady Rhaelle.  His father's eyes cloud over as he speaks of it.  Stannis lets the dragon climb his tunic and clamber across his shoulders.

There is another, back behind Mother's gardens, where heavy stone stairs lead down to a little seacave.  A great stag sleeps, its antlers woven into a crown, each tip as sharp as the point of a spear.  Stannis reaches out a hand to touch it, and draws back immediately.  As warm as life, but no movement.  He cannot even tell if it is breathing.

"Argella's Stag.  She kept it chained," he tells Melony, miming a fetter around his wrists, "until the day came she might want to kill her lord husband."  He slashes a hand across his throat, and feels a knife trying to form in his hand.

He lets it come, and they peer at it together.  The antler of the handle twists into something blinding white, as sharp as steel.

She whispers something in her own language, miming a downwards stab.  Her thin fingers are as white as the blade.

He holds it out to her.  "Gift.  For Melony."

He does not know if she is dream-creature or dreamer.  But from then on, she carries the little knife at her side.

-

The worst of them are in the tombs.

Robert has always told Stannis that the tombs are haunted, that the ghosts of proud Baratheons and murderous Durrandons do battle each night when the last of the light has gone, a wailing clash of swords and stags.

But that is not the truth of it.

Stannis waits in the tombs, until Storm's End above is still and silent, until the darkness swallows him up.  As the night wears on, he can hear them breathing. 

Still, slow.  Perhaps one breath for every turn of his firefly hourglass, one breath from a dozen tombs.  A wife, a daughter, an heir.  Perhaps it was not Elenei's gift at all.  Perhaps Durran dreamt her, a wife so perfect men would call her the daughter of gods.  Perhaps she'd dreamt him, a husband who could win her a kingdom.

His parents are not in the tombs.

Bodies wash in with every tide, knights and sailors, blue and swollen, picked over by crabs.  A boy with a patchwork face, who Stannis is certain is something his father made until, under Cressen's care, the boy wakes and proves himself mortal.

A black thought haunts his waking mind, and tries to chase him into the snowy forest.  HIs father's hands, rotting into bone.  His mother, beautiful and clever, who loved and was loved by his father so dearly - his mother's hands, tight around them, warm and pink and whole.  A line of bubbles in the water, dancing in time with the breath of the tombs.

-

He grows, and Renly grows, and Robert rides to war.

At first the siege is easy.

Robert knows nothing of the Gift, for their father never lived to tell him.  But enough of the servants do that it is no surprise to them when Stannis begins to sleep in the emptying storerooms, and wakes surrounded by food - bread, saltmeat, even the strange fruits that Melony presses into his hands each night.

At first, it is once a week.  Then more, and more, as men chew through the supplies far faster than he can restock them.  Renly cries when Stannis gives him no more fruit, but Melony's arms are thin, and her eyes are pale.

One night, she is no longer there at all.

And the snowdrifts pile in, and bury the trees, bury the sky.  By the sixth month of the siege, there is nothing in the forest but cold and choking white, and Stannis wakes each morning with empty hands.  Even the nightmares bother him no longer.

When the smuggler comes, Stannis knows he is not real.

-

Onions.  Saltfish.  A little black ship, dark as a nightmare, and her crew and her captain with her.  A small man, with brown hair and clever eyes.  Stannis has not truly dreamt in months, and even Renly's face has sunken into a skull with hunger.  Elenei has deserted him as sure as any other god, he knows that - but the only other alternative is that a smuggling crew has truly pushed past the blockade to relieve them, and even Robert's luck couldn't take him that far.

Stannis is not Robert.  Stannis is a cold thing, and he has grown colder still.  All of Storms' End crowds around the smuggler, hoarse with joy, but Stannis only watches him with narrowed eyes.

The man will flee when offered justice.  Real or dream, that will be the end of it.

He stays.  Blood and bones on the table, on his tunic, maimed hand pulled to his chest.

Cressen bandages his hand, gives him back his fingerbones.  And Stannis watches, still, watches the man he has made Ser Davos Seaworth.

Cressen turns to him, a bony hand on his shoulder.  Cressen knows.  Cressen knows even the truth of Renly.  "Surely you don't think -" he says, and Stannis wrenches his shoulder away.

Because he _does_ think.  Years pass, and still the question hangs.

 Ser Davos has a wife and sons – but what does that matter?  His hair grays, his pulse beats, he is warm and sure each scattered time that Stannis dares to touch him – what of it?

A man with shortened fingers, a hawk with shortened wings.  What else but a dream, would watch him break it, and love him for it?

-

Dragonstone is a place for nightmares.

They follow him into waking, curled around his window, invisible against the black spikes of the monstrosity that is now his keep.  Perhaps it is not the blood of gods he must thank for his Gift.  Perhaps it is the blood of dragons.

Even with a sword like his father’s, even with Melony’s gifts of flame, he leaves his chambers morning after morning with claw marks bleeding through his shirt, all Lord Steffon’s lessons so much mist.  The worst of it is that it that these battles are the only thing, now, that make him feel alive.

His new wife offers a shy hand, and he shrinks away in fear or fury.  A feathery thing with a beak of shark’s teeth shatters into dust, and he _smiles._  

He comes to the forest, one night, and Melony is waiting.

She is a woman, now, or perhaps she was never a child.  Her eyes are the same as they ever were.

A scaly nightmare is coiled in her lap, two tails wrapping up around her neck and shoulders.  She is whispering to it, petting its head as though it were a dog, and Stannis stands frozen.

“You,” she says, one hand rising up to beckon him.  “Stannis.”

He sits beside her, slow and stiff.  Melony’s fingers are red iron around his own.

“Look,” she says.  She can stumble along in his tongue, now, far better than when he was a child, and he tries to twist his mouth around the sounds of her own.

Pointed heads and teeth and beaks, black spikes and smoky flame.  The trees around them are thick with nightmares.

“You,” she says.  “You make these.”

“He gave me nothing,” Stannis whispers.  “A black rock in the ocean.  The last seat at the council.  He gave me _nothing._ ”

Melony shakes her head.  She leans forward, until her forehead touches Stannis’ own, until the tails of the nightmare wrap around them both.  “This.  You have this.  You have dreams.”  Both her hands grip his arms now, bands of fire.  “You have _everything._ ”

He wakes with a bracelet in his hands, red-white as the forge but cool to the touch.

For years to come, he dreams himself up no more enemies.

-

He awakens at the scream.  He hears it though half a castle’s worth of rock, knows it despite years of ignorance and neglect.  He is out of his bed in an instant, running for his daughter’s room, sword in hand.

Her door is open.  There are no guards.

He trips over the body of the first, sees the second, a moaning heap trying to clutch his entrails in.  And he sees his daughter.

Her hands are over her face, and they are red.  Her nightgown is stained red, and her pillow.  But she is moving, trying to press herself further back into a corner, and Stannis’ heart begins to beat again.  “Shireen!”

The nightmare springs.

It is a thing with a dragon’s head and too many wings.  He grabs at it with his off hand, pulling it away from his daughter.  Sharp scales dig into his palm.  He brings down the sword, again and again, and old feathers fly up from the mattress.

“Daughter –”

She does not answer him.  She does not take her hands from her face.

“Cressen!” Stannis screams out into the hall.  “Fetch Maester Cressen!”

Elenei’s Gift.  Durran’s Curse.  His, and now his daughter’s.  He remembers Argella’s stag.  Shireen would be no Lord of Storm’s End, nor even castellan.  She would be wed to some lordling who would let her keep no secrets of her own.  She would –

She gives a brief sob, trying to lower her hands. Beneath the blood, he sees a glint of bone.

Stannis holds her shaking shoulders, the most they’ve touched since she was a babe in arms.  “I’m sorry,” he whispers, “I’m sorry.”

-

He is not his father.  He cannot be the teacher to her Lord Steffon was to him.  But he will try, he vows, because he must.

“She was fortunate to live,” says Cressen, and Stannis hears censure in his voice.  He has failed.  He has failed his House and he has failed his child.

“The scars will fade with time.” Cressen again, and this to Selyse, and Stannis knows the lie.  The scars will change, they will lighten, but they will always be there, marking him, reminding Shireen and Stannis both of how he failed her.

“My daughter,” he tells Melony.  “My daughter.”

She reaches for her waist, for the dagger that he gave her when he was a child.  “For nightmares,” she says.  “Gift.  For Stannis’ daughter.”

As he takes the knife, the blade glows with flame.  Melony closes his hands around the hilt.

“ _Fire burns them all away.”_

-

He is a king.

Ser Davos stands beside him, waiting for night to fall.  He has a hundred letters, and ravens a thousand more, and what good will it do?  What good will any of it do?

Renly has none of these doubts.  Renly wears the crown as sure as Robert ever had, in the beginning.  And when Renly’s army overmatches them, and some Reachman drives a sword through Stannis’ chest, their precious king will fall at the same moment, whole and untouched.  Another breath in the tombs.

And Ser Davos –

Stannis finds himself lifting Seaworth’s maimed hand, every old doubt returning like crows to a battlefield.  Ser Davos should not take letters, he should take a sword of flame, or the half-guessed truth of himself (if it is the truth), send the Stormlands to pledge to something older by far than the Iron Throne.

Stannis has a crown.  His daughter made it for him, a circlet and antlers of a black too bright to be iron and too strong to be obsidian.

But the snow is rising in the forest, and Melony is gone.  And he never had the strength, not in the siege, to make a ship, a crew, a _life._   This man beside him, this hand warm through their gloves.

“Go with speed,” he tells Ser Davos, and watches him walk away into the gloom.

-

She comes with the morning mist.  The banners on the ship are faded red.  The crew is silent; half their tongues have been cut out.  It is brought into harbor to sit anchored with a hundred others, his slapdash navy of warships and merchantmen.

He had awoken, that morning, to see that one of his old hourglasses had run dry.  Sand lay pooled in the bottom, twisting like waves before wind.  The only thing left in the top bulb had been a ruby, round as a drop of blood.

That is why he is not afraid, when he sees the woman walking up towards the Stone Drum, crowds parting before her.  That is why he knows her, long before he sees her face.

Melony stands before him, draped in silks and jewels, richer than anything she’d worn in the forest.  He stands, frozen, as she reaches a hand towards his face.

“Oh,” she whispers, and her fingers brush his cheek.  “You are _real.”_

_-_

(One day they will stand, at the edge of the world, hearing the wails of dragons and the wings of wolves.  The ground is white, the sky is white, and around them the red trees whisper.

He reaches for her hand.  It is as warm as it ever was.)


End file.
